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Tips & Tricks Forum

Sharing a task or sending a task: how to report it's complete

cacal says:

Can anyone tell me of a way to use sharing or sending a task which allows the person I send to/share with to report back to me that the job is complete? I'd like to see it completed on my list too, maybe with the time done, and any comments the other user might want to get to me.

I haven't tried sharing with anyone yet, so I haven't been able to figure out if that is automatic or impossible. It seems like in the FAQs, that once you send or share something, it has its own separate life where it can be modified on the other person's list, and that info is in no way connected/synced back to the original owner of the task. Is that right?

Posted at 2:18am on February 28, 2008

bzpilman says:

From my experience it's the other way around, the one you wanted. Actually it's so much so, that I wish they were a little more separate. The person can just delete the task and you won't be asked first, with the task also getting deleted from your system. And you can't change the name independently, while keeping the connection, as to adequate it to your naming conventions (I have plenty) rather than to the person's.

Posted 9 years ago

aaronhh says:

That is weird. You would think that RTM would maintain a history of exactly who did what and when including deletions. If you are going to give multiple people editing capabilities to the same list, then there needs to be full accountability available for anyone to read in an easy to read log.

Posted 9 years ago

aaronhh says:

So, basically, you have to make it perfectly clear to all users that no tasks should ever be deleted, but only marked completed. Or better yet, give everybody instructions to not do anything but add new notes to the task describing details of exactly what was done towards the completion of that task. Wordpress.com seems to have a good system of allowing users to have one of four different levels of editing capabilities. They need that here in RTM as well.

Posted 9 years ago

xynetha says:

I completely agree aaronhh. I'm looking to RTM for managing the tasks for my student helpers, but the idea of them being able to delete tasks instead of being delegated tasks is worrisome.

Posted 9 years ago

aaronhh says:

I really hope they change the functionality of the shared lists soon, so that it maintains full accountability and even has the option of restoring deleted tasks on a shared list. I was recently working on a project with a classmate and I had initially given her access to the shared list, but I got so paranoid about her accidentally deleting items off of the list, that I ended up removing her access to the list. Because I could not fathom the possibility of losing any of my hard work to an incompetent user of my shared list. This should simply not be something that RTM users need to be concerned about. I hope RTM fixes this problem soon.

Posted 9 years ago

barendt says:

I find this interesting in terms of sharing but hope someone here might be able to provide some insight. I don't really worry about deleting task but would like to delegate tasks from Gmail. Can this be accomplished? Our university switched students to Google Apps and this would be a great way for me to assign tasks to them.

Posted 9 years ago

aaronhh says:

Delegating tasks works much better than sharing. Simply send a task to somebody and then the task will be sitting in your sent list and you won't be able to make any changes to it, but you will be able to see all of the changes that are being made to the task by the person that you sent the task to.

The problem occurs when you want to delegate that task to more than one person, because then you have to share the task at which point RTM no longer keeps accountability for exactly who is making what changes to the task. I think that is the case, but they may have updated something since the last time I took a look at it, which was about a month ago. hehe

Posted 9 years ago

bzpilman says:

Still, even if delegating to just one person, depending on the volume, you might not remember all the tasks and their exact properties (let's be real: you won't). So you would need to do some unnecessary tracking work just to make sure that one person isn't cheating and didn't do any accidental editing/deletion.

Posted 9 years ago

destroyer77 says:

"The problem occurs when you want to delegate that task to more than one person"

I'm reading over what everyone here is saying and yeah "sharing" a task might not be the best option, but has anybody moved over to the publish tab? You can "publish" for your contacts whatever you want them to do. It's NOT public to everyone, but more, I think (never tried this) print this out and do this kind of list. And since everyone here I assume uses e-mail :P Just ask them to e-mail you when your done. It might not be the best option, but for those people so skeptical about their student helpers accidentally deleting their tasks it might be a good option :)